The Other’s History in Built Environment Education A Case Study: History of Architecture

Abstract

If the world of the twenty-first century is indeed a global village, is it not time to sally forth from Fortress Europe and get to know the history and culture of the rest of the world?

(Hillenbrand, 2003, p.3)

The majority of English textbooks and reference books used in built environment education are limited to Western architecture and its origins. There is a continuing tendency by publishers to introduce new textbooks oriented to a ‘global history of architecture’; however this new genre is still very limited. Consequently History of Architecture and Contemporary Architecture curricula in most English-speaking countries focus on Western and Central Europe and the USA. The exclusion of ‘other’ architectures is largely due to the lack of the teaching material in English; however in some cases it may also have deeper roots within certain cultural perceptions.

Beyond History of Architecture, also topics such as Urban Planning, Landscape Architecture and Building Conservation represent the same limitations in spite of a couple exceptions. For example most African national parks in recent years have introduced a sustainable approach to landscape design with their man-made structures from natural materials; however these achievements are usually discussed only in tourism related essays. In the realm of Historic Building Conservation the author has been commissioned recently to write a book about international heritage preservation (Aygen, in press); the book will cover an important gap as there are very few academic publications on this subject area.

In most publications and university curricula there is a notable bi-polar approach to certain cultures. If they are mentioned at all, they are labelled as the ‘other’, thereby excluding any synchronic time comparison. Is there any ‘Christian Architecture’ as a discourse opposed to ‘Islamic Architecture’? Why does the ‘Beginnings of Architecture’ generally exclude sites in Asia, Africa and South America? These are some rhetorical questions which need to be answered. The Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History (GLAADH) project, supported by HEFCE, has shown that there is a will to change the existing attitude to ‘other’ architectures, but lack of resource is a limiting factor. This means that there is an urgent need to develop new methodologies for publications in order to enrich the existing built environment curricula in universities.

Keywords:

• History of Architecture
• Western Architecture
• Cross-Cultural Approach

Introduction: A History of Political Correctness

The first scene of the ‘Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment’ opens with Ray Banham…He is dressed in jeans and an Ed Roth T-shirt and carries in one hand a copy of the ‘History of Architecture on the Comparative Method’ by Sir Banister Fletcher…

(Pawley, 2000, p.28)

Martin Pawley, who wrote a Reader’s Guide to 20^th century architecture, concluded that ‘the reason that Banham could not swim across the Pacific’ ߞ indeed he excluded the other half of the world from having a well-tempered environment ߞ ‘was because he could not survive without that volume of Banister Fletcher after all’ (Pawley, 2000, p.131). The truth is none of us can survive without that volume of Banister Fletcher, (14^th edition, 1948), which, in addition to its 17^th, 18^th, 19^th and 20^th editions, adorns the shelves of several university libraries. It is very popular among students, because few of his 20^th century successors wrote a history of architecture using this comparative methodology. However, it has been updated continuously to include more parts of the world which were not included originally and distinguishes the ‘architecture of the other’ as ‘non-architecture’. Gulsum Baydar-Nalbantoglu argues that Fletcher valorised and disqualified non-European styles simultaneously (1998, p.9), a peculiarity which has been corrected politically in later editions. This continuous political correction reflects the changing history of architecture discourse. For example in the 1950s there was a tendency to represent the geographical east and west equally but in the 1970s ‘non-Western sections have been relegated to a pre-Western status’ (Baydar-Nalbantoglu, 1998, p.12), being categorised only as the beginnings of Western architecture. John McKean, who has been invited to be the editor for the 21^st edition of Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture, states that Banister Fletcher’s book had been the first survey of architecture to include regions outside the west formally as ‘non-historical’ styles. This affirmed ‘the classical colonial position of ‘Others’ not just outside history and civilisation, but genetically predetermined to inferiority’ (McKean, 2006, p.196).

A number of Fletcher’s contemporaries also looked at the history of architecture as a worldwide practice. For example H. Heathcote Statham in his A Short Critical History of Architecture (1927) compared plans of Coptic churches with Latin plans in the South Mediterranean; a comparison which disappears from later textbooks. A contemporary book review written in 1914 for the first edition implied that even this achievement was not considered sufficient, as it should have dealt briefly ‘at least with Scandinavian, Russian, Chinese and Japanese architecture’ (Batsford, 1914, p.160) It also called for equality between countries and cultures in terms of the space allotted to each chapter. Part of this request had already been fulfilled by the author James Fergusson, who included in his book History of the Modern Styles of Architecture, (1862) all the new developments in Scandinavia, Russia, India and Turkey (pp. 374–430), whereas publications about 20^th century architecture rarely thought these countries worthy of mention. Fergusson even accused western colonialism of being the culprit behind the loss of authenticity in the East.

He wrote in the mid-19^th century:

The Ambassadors of Western Powers have erected for themselves palaces at Pera in styles peculiar to the various countries they represent; and the Sultans of Turkey have learnt to admire these, as they have been taught to believe in every form of civilisation of Western Europe…

(Fergusson, 1862, pp. 427–428).

This early observation is still part of the architectural discourse of present Turkey, where in recent years reactionary projects in the form of neo-Ottoman design concepts have been introduced (Aygen, 2008).

There seems to be a general awareness of the ‘Other’ in the early stages of the development of the History of Architecture discipline, one of the earliest examples being Fischer von Erlach’s work from 1721 (Lefaivre and Tzonis 2004, p.280). Fischer von Erlach wrote a comparative history including most of the world known to him, unlike the authors of the 1970s, who had ceased to mention the other half from around the time of the Renaissance and relegated it to pre-Western status, as we saw above.

Some authors have been conscious of this fact and called their work history of western architecture; however many a textbook claiming to represent world architecture relates only to one side of the Pacific. Most books concentrate on Europe, the USA and sometimes Japan, if the book relates to the history of modernism and constructivism. If the book is a general work about the history of architecture, it usually represents a discipline limiting the beginnings of architecture to Europe and the Middle East and excludes Asia, Africa and the Americas. What is more, it limits the post-Renaissance period in architecture to Europe and North America, as if humans in other parts of the world never changed their architectural styles. This attitude may date from the celebrity authors of the 1950s like John Summerson (1904–1992) and Henry Russell-Hitchcock (1903–1987), who, according to Christy Anderson, perceived the Renaissance as the beginning of the modern age (cited by Lipstadt, 2005, p.48). They thus disregarded the ‘Other’ as pre-modern, by attributing to it a static, non-evolutionary character. Fergusson was interested in his contemporaries in 1862, but later this trail was lost. It could be said that the West thus got involved in a linear cultural evolution concept to be used for self-description which attuned well with the Weberian civilisation theories of the 19^th century.

The ‘Other’, especially the other in the East on the contrary, always believed in a more circular civilisation concept, as phrased by the eminent Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun in the 14^th century that: ‘It should be known that when the ruling dynasty starts on the road to senility and destruction the rise and beginning of the new dynasty takes place’ (Ibn Khaldun, 1958, p.128).

Ibn Khaldun’s development model was based on inevitable decay following maturity and his hypothesis that no culture can remain constantly at a high level of development (Kilcullen, 2010) strongly contradicted the Western model of the uninterrupted evolution of Western civilisation as opposed to the declining East, leading to the absence of the latter in teaching material. If one category of history of architecture text books ignores the East completely, the other category promotes its separation from the West. The two volumes of the Encyclopaedia of World Architecture by Henri Stierlin (1977) represented this attitude very clearly. The first volume was dedicated to the succession of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Rome, Byzantine Empire, Europe during the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque and Modern. But the second volume dealt with India, China, Persia, Turkey, countries of South-East Asia and South America and ‘Classical Islam’, in short all the ‘Others’ which are finally concluded with ‘Contemporary International Architecture’, which presented again solely works of European, North American and Japanese architects. This approach does not allow us, for example, to compare an Ottoman dome of the 16^th century with an Italian dome of the same period and ignores the fact that Leonardo da Vinci was invited to Istanbul to build a bridge over the Golden Horn.

This paper aims to investigate and compare history of architecture textbooks and curricula against this background to advocate a cross-cultural approach, which will promote a broader understanding of the history of the built environment as the history of a collaborative achievement by all humans. The methodology of the research consists of two parts, which involves an assessment of thirty text books and the curricula of thirty universities, mainly in the UK and USA, in terms of their global inclusiveness. The first part is based on an analysis of mainstream history of architecture textbooks claiming to present a ‘world history of architecture’ or to direct their focus upon generic architectural styles. Most of these are restricted regrettably to case studies from Europe and North America. Especially from the medieval period onwards, the history of architecture in text books is available mostly as a dual pairing between ‘western’ and ‘non-western architecture’, rather than a development of ‘world architecture’. The case studies for both categories have been chosen from the reading lists suggested in the relevant modules of the universities assessed in the second part of the research. The books relating to the ‘other history of architecture’ represent therefore the choice of these assessed modules and is critiqued by the author by highlighting their limitations in understanding the architecture of the ‘Other’ and suggesting complementary books to fill the gaps in knowledge. As the scope of the paper did not allow assessment of all the suggested publications by the thirty universities, this analysis focuses on those periods, topographies and cultural backgrounds most affected by these lacunae, with discussion of their most typical features.

On the other hand, the choice of the assessed universities depended on the accessibility and transparency of curricula. There is a need here for future research to analyse more curricula in history of built environment education on a global scale in order to provide a more comparative picture, which is again beyond the scope of this paper. One of the main observations during this research was that in both parts the western cultural theory of interrupted evolution was strongly represented. Ninety-five percent of the thirty text and reference books assessed continued to represent the linear approach based on the superiority of the West (Figure 1); only five percent saw the civilisation in an equalistic way embracing all cultures with their climaxes and anti-climaxes, with the main anti-climax attached to the colonial period. The distinction between ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ becomes more distinctive in the curricula of architectural courses in most universities of the world and probably not only the western world. This distinction may also be partly due to the absence of relevant text books and teaching material. The pilot study on university curricula indicates that a number of universities exclude the ‘Other’ only partially; this partial inclusion points out that their selection criteria probably depend on availability, as there is obviously a will to include. Obviously there are some attempts to avoid this discrimination and create an awareness of cultural diversity in higher education; however these attempts are fractional in comparison with overall practice.

Figure 1 Types of History of Architecture text books

In 2001 art and design historians at the University of Sussex, The Open University and Middlesex University launched the Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History (GLAADH) project in the United Kingdom to embed cultural diversity within Art, Architecture and Design curricula. A seminar involving a one-off workshop led by Professor Robert Hillenbrand, on incorporating Islamic art and architecture within university curricula, was organised by GLAADH in 2003. It is interesting to note here that the seminar concentrated particularly on the pre-20^th century period perhaps due to lack of interest and misbelief in the modern achievements of the Islamic world. One of the most important outcomes of the seminar as stressed by Professor Hillenbrand (GLAADH, 2003), was the acknowledgement of the lack of translations of inscriptions from Arabic, an issue related to the deficiency of original historiographies from non-Western cultures, which contributes an important part of the research presented here.

The research concludes with recommendations to raise awareness of the exclusion of the ‘Other’ in built environment education in order to provide a basis for more holistic and inclusive teaching and learning approaches in this area. Such practice will also support the integration of international students in the classroom by giving them the opportunity to discus their own culture on an equal basis.

Early Architecture and its Restricted World

Since the late classical period, the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’ represented the synthesis of the achievement of the Greek World and the Orient; a synthesis upon which Alexander the Great constructed his empire. Interestingly, the origins of architecture in 20^th century textbooks and curricula seem to have become frozen within the geographical limits of the post-Alexandrian period: a shrunken version of Alexander’s Empire concentrating on Egypt and Anatolia and pushing other parts of Asia away, as if they were no longer reachable. The institutionalisation of this civilisation concept has its roots in the 18^th century, when the history of architecture became a significant subject of study (Whyte, 2006, p.160; Watkin, 1980 and Allsopp, 1970), whereby European scholars began to classify cultures in different scales. It was influenced strongly during its emergence by the ‘orientalistic’ concept, ‘to which the colonial empires of Europe gave birth with their handful of often brilliant administrator scholars’ (Kuhrt and Sherwin-White, 1987, p.4). As Whyte emphasises, during the evolution of the history of architecture ‘the assumptions made by 18^th century antiquarians have remained remarkably influential’ (2006, p.160) and the discipline grew out of antiquarianism. It was mixed also with biblical concepts to justify within certain circles expeditions to Mesopotamia and Egypt. The increasing integration of historic sites from the Old and New Testaments in everyday language signified this aspect. The name Babel has come to designate the ‘huge city swarming with human beings speaking variously in a Babel of tongues’ (Ran, 1941, p.5), transposed to new conglomerations caused by early industrial developments. The perception of Ancient Egypt by Ancient Greece, fortified by the perception of Ancient Greece by Renaissance Europe, shaped the history of architectural concept of the modern and post-modern age.

How could one otherwise explain the exclusion of the Dilmun culture in Bahrain, contemporaneous with Sumer, but non-existent in textbooks and teaching? It is one of the world’s largest sites with burial mounds, ‘the Garden of Eden’ in Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, the site of a 4,000 year old stone temple, a civilisation which goes back to 3,200 B.C. (Abdul Nayeem, 1992, p.39; also citing Englund, 1935, p.35 and Hissan, 1986, p.336), with several successive occupation layers (see Figure 2). But Bahrain is never part of the history of architecture curricula even in Bahrain. Nor are the prehistoric copper mines in Oman, the main copper supplier of Mesopotamia, the Ubaid culture in Eastern Saudi Arabia or the remains in the Failaka Island in Kuwait, part of which was wiped out by bombing during the 1980 war. The Barbar temple in Bahrain, which is according to one of the leading archaeologists of the Bahrain expedition ‘not a temple of a type we had ever seen before, but there seemed no doubt about its nature’ (Bibby, 1996, p.51), presents convincing evidence that the main achievement of the early monumental architecture may be more varied than ziggurats and pyramids. This fading memory of the post-Alexandrian world at the threshold of the Middle Ages seems to have been adopted by later architectural historians and recurs repetitively.

Figure 2 The Dilmun city in Bahrain with walls of the Portuguese fort in background

(Photo: Zeynep Aygen)

Another exclusion related to the beginnings of architecture can be followed in the case of India, China and other parts of Eastern Asia. This part of the world is either never mentioned, stops at Persia (Trachtenberg and Hyman, 1986) or is mentioned, but separated. For example Moffet et al., (2003) who stated in their introduction to their quite comprehensive World History of Architecture that their book surveyed ‘Western architecture in depth and offers an introduction to non-Western architecture in India, China, South-East Asia and Japan and many Islamic settings’ (2003, p.1). This quote itself contradicts the title ‘World Architecture’ as it implies polarisation and recalls the late Edward Said, who wrote that ‘the Orient is…one of Europe’s deepest and most recurring images of the Other’ (1995, p.1). Indeed, although the sites Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in India are mentioned (Moffet et al., 2003, p.67, ff), they do not appear comparatively with European and Middle Eastern case studies from the same early period. Instead they provide the introduction to the chapter ‘The Architecture of Ancient India’, which finishes with Angkor Wat in Cambodia, dating back to 1120 AD. Even the extraordinary comparative book by Spiro Kostof, who did not make distinctions ‘between high cultures and low’ (1995, Preface), a principle which truly applies to a major part of the book, limited the case studies related to early architecture within western Asia. In recent years there have been a few attempts to consider the architecture of the world equally; the work by Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash (2007) gives good cause for hope. However, there is a great scope for further improvement.

A further segregation, partly due to the lack of excavations and publications, which also denotes a lack of interest, can be observed in the absence of pre-historic sites in Africa and the Americas and other parts of the world, especially in the context of teaching. If these sites are mentioned at all, they are separated to present their own history, which stops at the point of European conquest. This is especially the case with the curricula of North American universities; for example the University of Washington in the USA runs two units entitled Appreciation of Architecture. Both Appreciation of Architecture I (Arch 150) and Appreciation of Architecture II (Arch 151) concentrate on the ‘historical survey of the architecture of Western civilisation’, (University of Washington, 2007) whereas the other pole is represented through a unit called ‘World Architecture: Non Western Cultures’ (Arch 251). Arch 251 is, according to its description on the web, an ‘introduction to historical and contemporary built environments of non-Judeo-Christian civilisations, primarily Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and Meso-American’ (University of Washington, 2007). Apart from the contradiction that the first three descriptions are based on religion while the fourth about America is geographic, it is interesting for this survey to note that ‘western civilisation’ is strongly separated and is probably associated with Judeo-Christianity.

The separation between western and non-western architecture will be followed up in the next chapters with more case studies. However, it should be identified here that in terms of early architectural achievements, the world is usually described through its biblical roots and post-Alexandrian scholastic heritage, both of which not only distinguish European or western civilisation as superior to others but also assign to it a pre-arranged geographical domain. It therefore seems to create a difficulty, especially for American universities, to locate both the early architecture of their own continent as a part of their national heritage, and American culture as part of western civilisation. European universities solve this problem through the above described biblical roots and antiquarian tradition as long as they deal with early architecture; once they shift to the medieval period they tend to ignore the other parts of the world, an approach shared by many authors of textbooks. The limited scope of this paper does not allow for analysing curricula and textbooks in those neglected cultures and countries; on the other hand personal experience indicates that ‘East’ simply copies or follows ‘West’. It is not often that universities in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America develop separate textbooks, in practice translations of European or American authors are widely used.

Who Invented The Gothic Rib?

The Gothic rib is an artefact of which contemporary Europe is often proud, like Gothic itself. Whyte writes that ‘for many eighteenth century Englishmen, Gothic architecture was synonymous with native liberty’ (2006, p.160) and for 19^th century architectural historians like Viollet le Duc, ‘the ribbed vault commanded the form and disposition of all the other members of the edifice’ (Branner, 1968, p.20). Together with the pointed arch and flying buttress the ribbed vault determined for many authors since Viollet le Duc the Gothic character of a building, a description which still appears in a number of recently published text books (for example Cole, 2003, p.200). For Fritz Baumgart the ‘innovation of rib vaulting signified that it was no longer necessary for vaulting compartments to square, but it involved the exclusive use of pointed arches’ (1969, p.90). Some other books like Great Architecture of the World (Norwich, 1975, p.115) rejected this attitude and disputed the importance attached to the rib. According to them the vault and the buttress were more important, although the latter was not employed in all Gothic buildings and the pointed arch, one of the attributes, was employed in many a Romanesque building, especially in Burgundy, as Branner explains (1968, p.20).

The architecture of the ‘Other’ also has ribs, pointed arches, vaults and flying buttresses, which are referred to rarely, even when comparing east and west. One of the rare exceptions can be seen in the fourth edition of David Watkin, who wrote that ‘though characteristic features such as rib vault and pointed arch had appeared both in Islamic and Romanesque architecture, Gothic could represent a break with the past’ (2005, p.149). At this stage the question of which past this is related to should be raised. For the 20^th edition of Fletcher edited by Dan Cruickshank it is the architectural inheritance of Greece and Rome with which Gothic architecture wanted to have a complete break (1996, p.423). Medieval Gothic thinking reflected the age of Christian utopias and the Crusades, where the ‘Other’ began to be defined clearly. Missionaries and historians like Fulcherius Cornotensis and Albertus Aquensis were among the earliest examples of this genre (Demirkent, 1994, p.XXII). Some of these chronicles, like ‘Historia Iberosolymitana: Gesta Francorum Iherusalem Pereginentium’, were quite descriptive of the built environment but concentrated more on warfare (Cahen, 1968, p.432). However, earlier, when the Mediterranean was closely interwoven and relatively peaceful, monks travelled to the countries of the newly emerging Muslim empires to contact the scholars of these countries, who were translating Greek texts into Arabic and Persian. These monks, who were also the building masters of the monasteries and cathedrals to be described later as ‘Romanesque’, valued the wisdom of the East and acknowledged it as the custodian of the Greco-roman civilisation. We happen to know through translated work that medicine and mathematics were the two areas in which the information provided by the new scientists of the Middle East and North Africa was transmitted through monks to Europe; a third area, which is open to research, might be architecture. This possibility was never explored, impossible as it seems. Within the still valid 19^th century Christianised interpretation of Gothic, a common view expressed by Paul Frankl in 1962 was that ‘the common root of different aspects of medieval culture lays in the personality of Jesus’ (as cited in Watkin, 2005, p.149) and not in the activities of artisan clergy. But does this reflect reality?

One of the first ribbed vaults in the history of architecture can be seen in Bulla Regia in Tunisia, a Roman site in North Africa (Figure 3). The absence of this rib in European Roman and early Byzantine sites suggests that the rib may have been used for the first time in Africa, as I discovered during a visit to the site. The rib in its load-bearing capacity was used later in the 10^th century in the Great Mosque of Cordoba in the expansion commissioned by al-Hakam II. Marianne Barrucand and Achim Bednorz who wrote an extensive book about Moorish Architecture in Andalusia (1992), struggled to accept the fact that ribs in this building dating back to 966 could have been the predecessors of Gothic ribs in Europe (p.75–85). They argue that the ribs here in Cordoba are earlier and less developed and therefore could not have had anything to do with Gothic cupolas (p.76), a weak argument in their otherwise impressive study. They then argued that it was also impossible to link the Cordoba case study to Roman and concluded that they may have been linked through Persia to a much older tradition, the origins of which are very uncertain. Cordoba is certainly closer to Tunisia than it is to Persia, but nobody seems to think that it might be much more logical to follow the succession of those elements such as the vault, pointed arch and rib between the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

Figure 3 Rib in Bulla Regia, Tunisia, was the rib vault originally invented in Roman Africa?

(Photo: Marika Snider)

The surprising mixture of the crossed ribs in early 8^th century Kasr Kharna in the Jordanian desert certainly indicates this interpretation. Henri Stierlin, who pointed out the Byzantine and Sassanid influences in this structure may thus answer Barrucand’s question (1996, p.69). He is also one of the very few scholars to suggest that the system of vaulting in the Great Mosque of Cordoba ‘is the forerunner of the ribbed arches which were to revolutionize European architecture in the Gothic period’ (1996, p.100). Even today eminent scholars like Peter Draper (2005) publish papers to prove the uniqueness of western Gothic based on the western application of the pointed arch technology, for which he can find no parallel in the east. Every culture has developed unique building technologies; however all of them were inspired by earlier case studies and brought them one step further. Obviously it is difficult for the west to accept even a possibility that the forerunner of Gothic can be found in the east.

Europe’s relationship with Gothic was defined through Europe’s attitude to the ‘Other’, which explains the ambivalent position Gothic holds in the history of architecture in regard to its origins. It is a love-hate relationship which, when in love, rejects Gothic’s other roots, but accepts them in order to hate it. Christopher Wren (1632–1723) condemned ‘the Saracen make of building, seen in the East, soon spread over Europe’ (Ganim, 2005, p.5) to defend his own classicism. John Aubrey (1626–97), took it one step further by attaching Gothic to ‘Barbarians’, a term which was applied in 18^th century Europe to both Nordic invaders and Eastern ‘Saracens’. Later in the 19^th century John Ruskin at first showed some sympathy to the eastern origins of Gothic and called it ‘the love stream of the Arab’ which ‘even after it ceased to flow, warmed the whole of Northern air’ (Ganim, 2005, p.40). But he changed his mind later and began to polarise Gothic and Islamic design. For Pugin, however, in contrast to Ruskin, Gothic pointed arches were purely Christian, as reflected in the title of one of his books (Pugin, 2003). Finally, in 1948, Pevsner was vague about the structural origins of Gothic and held the view that ‘the Gothic style was not created because somebody invented rib vaulting’ (Whyte, 2006, pp. 162–163). From this point onwards this ‘somebody’ remains hidden.

Comparisons between east and west, between Europe and the Middle East, between Stonehenge in Britain and Ur in Mesopotamia seem to be confined to the prehistoric period. When it comes to medieval architecture, only the combination of early Christian and Byzantine architecture is compared sometimes with Islamic architecture. However, it was believed at the same time to have different results, as they (Muslims) created buildings to serve and symbolise Islam (Moffet et al., 2003, p.14). So far, so good, but why are the desert palaces of Jordan and the fortresses of Yemen (Figure 4) ‘Islamic’, while European fortresses are ‘Medieval’? It is indeed a widely accepted view that Islam influenced urban development and shaped the physical environment of the countries within its domains (Ettinghausen et al., 2002; Mortada, 2002; Al-Hathloul, 1996) and reached a synthesis of diversity embracing regional differences. Still, a typology-based comparison could reveal much more interesting issues than this isolated approach and would help us to see the history of architecture in its broader context.

Figure 4 A Fortress in Yemen-Islamic Architecture or Medieval Architecture?

(Photo: Harald Witter)

Another interesting fact in the history of architecture of the medieval period is the nearly total exclusion of Africa. The Great Mosque in Kilwa in Tanzania. dating back to the 12^th century (Denyer, 1978, p.194), appears neither in the generic chronological work about world architecture, nor in the more specific books looking to the architecture of Islam in depth. It is only due to the efforts of the Aga Khan Foundation in the last twenty years that Islamic architecture in Africa is slowly gaining the attention it deserves, however there is still a long way to go. Similarly the rock-hewn churches of Ethiopia going back to the 10^th century are never mentioned as a part of Christian architecture. Even the very elaborate, recently published world architecture book by Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash (2007) dedicated to Africa, has in its bibliography only one item called ‘African Kingdoms’. One of the rare publications about Islamic architecture to include case studies from Africa is The Architecture of the Islamic World edited by George Mitchell (first published in 1978). The 1996 edition of this book caused considerable confusion for me and some colleagues as its front cover claimed to be a ‘detail of the Friday Mosque in Isfahan’. But with its distinctive red-white colour concept and façade elements the building is clearly representative of the Mughal architecture of the Indian sub-continent. We decided that it was the Badshahi Mosque of which there is also a photograph in the book, and a colleague who has seen it has verified this. It is also clearly depicted in Ebba Koch’s book about Mughal architecture (1991, p.31/Fig 20). The stylistic differences between these two buildings could be compared with mistaking Notre Dame for Durham Cathedral. The origin of the error may lay subconsciously in the historical concept of generalising the architecture of the ‘Other’ as exotic and not looking at its periodical and regional differences. It has to be added that apart from this error, Mitchell’s book is one of the rare equalistic publications in this area.

The Modern Half of the World

The combination of the separation of the medieval East and West and the identification of the Renaissance as the starting point of the modern age (Muthesius, 2006, p.279) led together to the categorisation of the ‘Other’ as ‘pre-modern’. This is one of the most important factors in the development of the history of architecture. The role of Byzantine architecture in the Renaissance is ignored; the influence of Baroque in non-European countries, as in the case of the Ottoman Empire, is never mentioned. Most importantly one part of the world is completely left out of contemporary interpretations of modernism, constructivism and quite often also regionalism and vernacularism, rejecting the fact that two of its pioneers, Hassan Fathy and Ramses Wassaf come from Egypt. For example Kenneth Frampton in his Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1992), closed his chapter about the ‘monumentalisation of the vernacular’ with Pikionis from Greece and terminated the boundaries of architecture at the boundaries of Europe. He was aware of this ‘imbalance’, as he stated in his preface to this edition and hoped to ‘redress it by including recent works in India, Australia, Canada, Latin America and the Middle East’ (p.326). This apology accentuated the fact that the countries thus mentioned were perceived as an anomaly, rather than being naturally a part of modern architecture. Niels Prak, a Professor at the University of Delft asked himself why some architects are more famous and others not. He explains it through the ‘star’ phenomenon (cited in Pawley, 2000, p.94). However a preference for stars and stardom in modern architecture is only a privilege for a limited part of the world or of those like Zaha Hadid, who became famous in the Western world.

The difficulty western critics and architectural historians face by choosing their case studies has its origins not in the built environment, but in the written word. An architect becomes famous usually through a written manifesto; according to Jencks and Kropf (2006, p.4) ‘theory is a kind of congealed manifesto, its violence subtracted to become acceptable in the groves of academe’. The question to be asked at this point is in which language and script has this theory been written? As early as the 18^th century, at the very beginning of architectural and archaeological classifications, Winckelmann stated that the primary use of monuments was to shed light on the literature of the time (Lolla, 2003, p.14). He chose monuments to explain the underlying theory where appropriate literature was available or vice versa. For him the primary medium for explaining the classical period was the text; the built object merely assisted in this task. Winckelmann had ample access to relevant literature as ancient Greek had become since the Renaissance more and more fashionable. Scholars no longer depended on translations from Arabic, as was the case in the medieval period; they now had direct access to the narrative. So at the same time as the ancient Greek narrative was becoming more accessible, the Arabic narrative was becoming less accessible, before it was pushed finally into the orientalists’ corner. This was the turning point of the creation of borderlines, as it relegated the ‘Other’s creation to the ‘unconscious’.

Stefan Muthesius reminds us about the creation of borderlines in 19^th century architectural history, that ‘in the 1870s and 1880s the establishment of the new border line between an “unconscious” and “conscious”’ coincided with the full establishment of the study of vernacular architecture and design (2006, p. 280). This led to the juxtaposition of vernacular with unconscious, reflected in a way also in Fletcher’s classification of non-European architecture as ‘non-historical’. Baydar-Nalbantoglu realised during her study of Fletcher’s different editions that ‘the stake here is not merely the boundary between Western architecture and its outside, but also between architecture and non-architecture’ (1998, p.8). Non-architecture is unconscious architecture, architecture without a narrative, without a theory. The manifesto is missing; so it is ‘vernacular’ and ‘exotic’: vernacular because it is unconscious and exotic because its language is a mystery. So Fathy’s architecture is categorised often as vernacular and regional, an architecture which Alan Colquhoun believes to be ‘more a product of wishful thinking’ (cited in Edge et al., 2006, p.86). However architectural historians writing about the 20^th century make a distinction between vernacular regionalism and functional regionalism or ‘critical regionalism’, as Frampton (1992) calls it. So while Fathy is only mentioned in the category of vernacular regionalism, if at all, the Spanish Ricardo Bofill and the Greek architect Pikionis are usually claimed to be pioneers of critical regionalism. Obviously the ‘others’ like the Egyptians Fathy (1900–1989) and Wassaf (1911–1974), cannot be representatives of critical regionalism or the Turkish architect Sedad Hakki Eldem (1908–1988/ Figure 5), who built predominantly in the modernist vernacular line of Le Corbusier, cannot be mentioned alongside the Greek architect Aris Konstantinidis. The manifesto of critical regionalism, like stardom in architecture, seems to be taken as a privilege of the west as it is ‘opposed to the sentimental simulation of local vernacular’ and it does not ‘abandon the emancipatory and progressive aspects of the modern architectural legacy’ (Frampton, 1992, p.327). East has been always perceived as ‘sentimental’ and still ‘developing’ in terms of reaching the goal of modernity, which may explain the borderline of critical regionalism.

Figure 5 S. H. Eldem: Social Security Building, Istanbul-Turkey

(Photo: Zeynep Aygen)

Patrick Nuttgens pursued the idea that the period between 1880 and 1920 distinguished the beginning of a new era, ‘an exciting, almost hysterical time. In both Europe and America cities grew and sophisticated technology developed at amazing speed’ (Muttgens, 1997, p.252). Here is the twist: the segregation criterion signifies not only ‘critical thinking’, but also the level of new technological achievement associated with it, the same reasoning behind the attachment of the invention of the Gothic rib to Europe. Even the fairly comprehensive work by Jonathan Glancey, who is one of the rare authors to discuss the non-existence of African architecture dealing with early periods of architectural development and includes case studies of Africa within his own concept, limits contemporary architecture to the ‘Machine Age’ (Glancey, 2000, p.157 ff). Therefore only internationalism represented the next period from the 1930s onwards in Nuttgens’ book; regionalism did not count. Although he believed that this following period was the first and only time in the history of architecture where housing for ordinary men and women became the vehicle for great architecture, Fathy’s architecture for the poor people of Gourna or Charles Correa’s Gandhi Ashram Museum in Ahmadabad were not included. Outside Europe and North America the only countries to be mentioned as part of the ‘new international field’ were Japan, another industrialised country, and Brazil, mainly in connection with Le Corbusier’s influence and Chandigarh because again Le Corbusier built there.

In the last few years there has been a growing awareness of this exclusion; for example Jeremy Melvin’s short but comprehensive …Isms (2005) displays a fair selection of projects in a genuinely global sense. Still, most of the contemporary architectural production from countries outside Europe is published rather in books like New Directions in Tropical Asian Architecture (Goad and Pieris, 2005), in which one can see the 2003 realisation of Le Corbusier’s towers from Le Ville Radieuse in Singapore, or in journals like World Architecture. The main reason behind this disintegration is the lack of acknowledgement of the ‘Other’s’ manifesto. Frampton noted in his Modern Architecture: A Critical History that he has tried ‘whenever possible to let the protagonists speak for themselves. Each chapter is introduced by a quotation, chosen either for its insight into a particular cultural situation or for its capacity to reveal the content of the work’ (Frampton, 1992, p.9). Is it possible that the choice was limited by language? What happens if the protagonists cannot speak for themselves or worse, that they speak verbally and literally a language which is not known to the architectural historian? Fathy was in a sense one of the lucky ‘others’, as his manifesto Architecture for the Poor reached the west and made him famous there. But it was at the same time his misfortune, since it categorised him by a concept of building exclusively for the poor of the ‘Third World’. Only after James Steele published An Architecture for People: The Complete Works of Hassan Fathy (1997), did Fathy begin to be acknowledged also in his capacity as one the pioneers of bio-climatic architecture. Charles Jencks and Karl Kropf (2006) are among the few authors mentioning Fathy in his ecological pioneer role.

The Condition of Curricula: A Pilot Study

A pilot research conducted by the author in 2006–2008 was dedicated to the investigation of architectural history curricula in thirty universities located mainly in the UK and USA, with the complementary addition of one university from Australia, Canada and New Zealand each. All of the information gained in relation to the assessed curricula compared their web representation with a set of criteria to test their approach to the ‘Other’. While the first assessment criterion looked to the total absence of the ‘Other’, the second criterion analysed the separation of ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ cultures which leads to the exclusion of a comparative mode of teaching.

The distribution of the universities between the countries and the choice of the universities in each country is by random selection and availability. The samples cover a variety in size, ranking and sometimes in the subject area, the details of which can be followed through the list of universities presented in the Appendix. Although in some cases limitations originating from inaccessible or insufficient web representation may have affected the choice of case studies and their interpretation, it is still felt that the samples collected are quite representative.

One of the three pie charts below reveals that the percentage of universities who exclude a global approach from history of architecture education completely is low, whereas those who separate East from West make up nearly half of the assessed universities. However the high percentage in the chart reflecting the separation of the ‘Other’ mode is striking, a very small section of universities have inclusive and globally balanced curricula, the details of which will be discussed below.

Figure 6 Representation of the ‘Other’ in Curricula

Out of 17 American universities, the History of Art and History of Architecture modules of five universities exclude non-European and non-American cultures completely; while one concentrates completely on the USA. Two of them still offer optional units or short seminars on East Asian and South-East Asian cultures, which indicate a problem of appropriate resources, rather than an intention to exclude the other cultures. Similar behaviour can be followed with one of the three excluding UK universities, which is completely UK oriented; however it declares that cross-cultural studies are available for those who are interested. The one university in Canada, randomly selected to be part of this pilot study, is also within the excluding group.

On the other hand when it comes to the separation of the ‘Other’, seven of the US universities base their modules on separation by offering units like ‘Modernism in the Non-Western World’ or studies in ‘Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and Meso-American cultures’, the latter combining three religion and one geography-based distinction criteria. Similar behaviour can be seen with the one Australian University, which offers a module called ‘Arab Architectural Thought’. It would be interesting in this case to know if the world-famous representative of regionalism, Hassan Fathy, who happened to be an Egyptian, is categorised within the ‘isms’ of the 20^th century or within the ‘Arab Architectural Thought’. Three of the evaluated UK universities separate ‘West’ from ‘in comparison selected cultures’, as one of these universities describes it. In one special case in the USA the separation comes in one case after the Renaissance and in another case after the Enlightenment, representing the same issue discussed for text books previously in this paper.

An analysis of relevant universities has revealed that inclusivity is not always to do with the ranking of the university or the reputation of its course. While some quite famous courses seem to be part of the excluding or separating practice, some smaller universities offer quite inclusive teaching modes. This suggests that the problem of exclusion does not go back every time to the lack of resources; sometimes it may be going back to the attitude which results in units like ‘Third World Development’, as it is the case with one highly ranked USA university, which certainly has far greater research facilities in comparison with some smaller universities, which still make the effort.

Among the globally inclusive courses some have quite promising unit names like ‘History of World Architecture’, in unison with the aim of this research to see the development of built environment as a joint achievement of all humans. The School of Architecture of the randomly selected university from New Zealand also offers an inclusive concept. On the other hand two of the most inclusive UK courses explain their limitations in offering more inclusive units as ‘due to the lack of script or translated text’. A similar statement can be found in one USA case which will ‘include Asia, Africa and Latin America, where possible’. This is again an evidence of the urgent demand calling for the translation the non-English manifesto.

Conclusion: Western versus Non-Western

The boundary of language and culture can only be crossed if architectural historians learn to work across disciplines. For example Ottoman architecture is usually subject to misunderstandings, as discussed by Arnold et al. (2006, Chapter 8). Whyte also draws attention to the fact that ‘Western observers had great difficulty seeing Ottoman architecture as anything more than a decadent mixture of Persian, Byzantine and other styles’ (2006, p.171). On the other hand Ottoman head architect Sinan’s design practice was transmitted by his friend Mustafa Said Celebi, assumed to have been dictated partly by the architect himself. This 16^th century document, called Tezkiret-ul Bunyan (Documentation of Buildings), disseminates information on the imperial architect’s work and can be supported by other manuscripts from the same period to understand more clearly the concept behind Sinan’s buildings. Ulku B. Bates, who works on Ottoman archival documents, pointed out in her paper Two Ottoman Documents on Architects in Egypt, the merits of archival work to clarify this architect’s role in the Ottoman Empire. The documents she dealt with in her paper are royal court decrees concerning the activities of architects, which refers to the chief architect Sinan (Bates, 1985, p.123). The documents, which are so valuable for the interpretation of the Ottoman architecture, are in Ottoman-Turkish written in Arabic script. This means that only a historian specialising on Ottoman archives can read it. Did any of the historians who condemn Ottoman architecture consult Turkish studies journals? I doubt it.

The case of the Ottoman Empire establishes also a good example for the westernisation of architectural training, which took place as a direct result of western military aid and superior technology (Aygen, 2007, p.2). The adoration of the increasing power of the west opened the way for European architects to work in the Ottoman Empire and for students to be sent to Europe to learn the now much celebrated western design principles. These students began to take over the architectural training at design schools on their return as lecturers, a process which could be easily adapted to a number of the case studies in the ‘other’ part of the world. Technology becoming a later criterion for segregation was not developed originally by the colonist; it was developed by the colonised.

Today ‘the projects we examine and sometimes conceive, are post-theoretical stakes, are a redefinition of how we go about projects’, so the instructor Scott C. Wolf from the University of Southern California quotes Bart Lootsma (Wolf, 2006). So if the theory is not available due to the language problem, the project cannot be conceived. In that case all histories will be limited inevitably by the available script, which leads to monopolisation. The monopolisation of writing the history of architecture in European languages is one of the main reasons behind the lack of communication in a global sense. Moreover this monopoly is reflected in teaching; McKean who was in charge of the history courses of the Colombo School of Architecture in Sri Lanka in the 1970s, writes that students there ‘were reading their own traditions as ‘exotic’, as the text underpinning the curriculum was Banister Fletcher’s history’. He adds that ‘the hegemony of Banister Fletcher in that architecture school is exactly paralleled by studies of how the English language and the concepts it signified were carried to colonised sites’ (McKean, 2006, p.195). I had a similar experience when I taught at the University of Bahrain. After a period of intense effort learning Arabic, I ran to the university library to look at a certain book with many mosque drawings, which I thought would provide an opportunity to understand the local view of Islamic architecture, to discover that it was a translation from English. We saw in the Introduction of this paper that Fergusson had observed this phenomenon as early as 1862, ‘the Sultans have been taught to believe in every form of civilisation of Western Europe’ (1862, p.428).

In the age of globalisation the exclusion of the ‘Other’ in built environment education is felt mostly in architectural training. While textbooks are increasingly making efforts to achieve a global balance, their efforts are not yet reflected in the curricula of architectural schools, most of which have an educational policy based on ‘western’ versus ‘non western’. As this pilot research conducted between English speaking universities reveals, a number of universities offer separate units for western architecture and non-western architecture, whereas some concentrate only on western architecture. Progress in textbooks will not be enough so long as universities remain reluctant to unite the globe and encourage their students into far more inter-disciplinary research to make more use of the inter-cultural debates recommended by Borden and Rendell (2000) in their essay on architectural history methodology. The shift from the ‘Babel of tongues’ to a united language in teaching the history of architecture can only happen through the joint efforts of its translators.

The last couple of years have revealed promising efforts in this direction. One of the aims of the GLAADH project was to help teachers in Higher Education to integrate the arts of less traditional studies and communities into the curriculum. As a result several UK universities have taken the initiative of enriching their teaching resources by developing new networks, organising study field trips to non-European countries and co-operating with archives. Later in 2008, I applied to the Learning and Teaching Project Funding in my own university and received partial funding to enhance a digital pilot archive to enrich University of Portsmouth resources to support a global history of architecture curriculum in the relevant departments. My concept is based on integrating international postgraduate students studying in our university into the development process of additional teaching resources to represent currently under-represented architectural themes. This research-informed teaching concept will also help postgraduate students to gain research and analytical skills because developed material either does not exist or exists within other cultures and in foreign languages. Material is carefully moderated by academics before it is transferred to a virtual learning environment based digital archive. This resource, which will be primarily available for our own students, may be opened later to staff and students at other universities under an ‘open courseware’ model.

Even to conduct this modest project will consume much time and energy; however it is now the right time to start it. As Donald Preziosi (2007) states in his keynote speech for a GLAADH conference focusing on curriculum change, when he quotes the words of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz:

To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves among others…that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.

APPENDIX

A List of the Assessed Universities

The assessment is based on the author’s research between 2006–2009.

USA

Berkeley (University of California) / Department of Architecture

California Polytechnic State University/ College of Architecture and Environmental Design

Howard University/ School of Architecture & Design

Illinois Central College/ Department of Arts & Communications (Architecture Transfer Programme)

Ohio State University/ History of Art Department

Roger Williams University/ School of Architecture

SUSA Southern University and A & M College, Baton Rouge/ School of Architecture

Rice University/ School of Architecture

Texas Tech University/ College of Architecture

University of Hawai’i at Manoa/ School of Architecture

University of Illinois at Urbana/ School of Architecture

University of Maryland/ School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation

University of Michigan/ A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning

University of Pittsburgh/ Department of History of Art and Architecture

USC University of Southern California/ School of Architecture

University of Washington/ Department of Architecture

Washington University in St. Louis/ Department of Art History & Archaeology

UK

Birbeck University of London/ Department of History of Art and Screen Media

Oxford Brookes University/ School of the Built Environment

University College London/ The Bartlett School of Architecture

University of Bath/ Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering

University of Cambridge/ Department of Architecture

University of Essex/ Department of Art History and Theory

University of Reading/ Department of Fine Art

University of Portsmouth/ Portsmouth School of Architecture

University of Portsmouth/ School of Environmental Design and Management

Australia

University of Adelaide/ School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design

Canada

University of Waterloo/ School of Architecture

New Zealand

Victoria University of Wellington/ School of Architecture